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Notes -
Is voting conflict now? According to SS and his ridiculous euphemism "memetic political conflict", even discussion is conflict.
As Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means. Another way of looking at it is that politics is a continuation of war by other means.
Some people use this logic to justify democracy as the alternative to bloody civil war. Rather than slaughtering each other to resolve political conflicts, we vote and then accept majority rule.
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Of course.
Another way to look at it is the vote that happens after a debate to determine the winner.
But even from a perspective of the vote as representing force, the vote is less an instrument of conflict than a sublimation of it.
It's a proxy for "how many divisions can you field" and the further it is removed from that the less useful it is as a consensus mechanism. Because then, you "win" an "election" and the people with more divisions topple your illegitimate regime.
You can't escape violence, you can only add abstractions on top of it. Liberals used to understand this before they fell for their own propaganda.
I understand one-man-one-gun-one-vote fine, I don't see why it should undermine debate or democracy.
If you want; then I am pro-abstraction. One man goes around shooting people - another talks to them, then counts their vote, and then, only if he has won, uses limited force. Do you think they are the same?
It's not the same. We've long known of the distinction between abstraction heavy and light regimes, i.e. Machiavelli's Foxes and Lions. But I'm not sure you are fully aware of the tradeoffs.
For instance, a common criticism of fox regimes is that they, by nature, have to be totalitarian. The legitimacy they rest on relies on the illusion of public support, which means they have to control and shape public opinion as much as possible. This is how it is paradoxically democracies that have brought forth general conscription, total war and the most sophisticated forms of psychological warfare.
This isn't all to say that debate is useless or pointless. Nor even that Fox regimes are strictly worse that Lion ones. Merely that it is foolish to think oneself secure from the forces of power, however many pieces of paper one hides behind.
Debate only really is possible in the areas of life that do not concern power, and this isn't something that can be changed. To the dismay of any and all anarchists.
I think a reality check is enough to disabuse people of that theory, if ‘totalitarian’ is to keep any meaning.
I take it you categorize the ur-totalitarian communist, and nazi regimes, as ‘light’, ‘fox regimes’? Even though they were opposed to debate, to voting, and made direct unrestrained force the order of the day?
There’s a contradiction here. If the people are truly powerless, their support a mere ‘illusion’, why do the rulers need it, shape it? Your answer ‘Legitimacy’ is tautological. Why do the people in power need this ‘legitimacy’, what is legitimacy but the people’s acceptance of a ruler’s authority?
That would be silly. Of course Hitlerism and Stalinism are lion regimes, and the late Soviet Union a fox regime. Your mistake is assuming that just because I'm providing a criticism of foxes, there aren't any of lions. However, it turns out that, much to the dismay of mediocre political analysts everywhere, politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism.
Indeed, my point (or rather De Jouvenel's and Aristostle's) is that democracies are structurally more inclined towards mass politics. This isn't even disputed by democrats most of the time, as they tend to regard participation in politics as not a right, but a duty as well. This involvement of literally every sphere of life in the political process being, ultimately, totalitarian. Democracies are most often fox regimes (though not always), so this is also a very common feature of foxes.
You'll be able to get a good feeling for this by discussing with people who live in despotic nations. They live lives that are mostly free of political thoughts compared to people who live in democracies since that area is so obviously off bounds dangerous territory. Politics then is the exclusive domain of despots and dissidents.
Whether this is good or bad is a matter of opinion. But it is the case.
Aristostle argues this is bad because it is this tendency that allows democracies to decay into mob rule (or rather, politeia into democracy).
This question is the object of a century old academic debate within scholars of Elite Theory, between partisans of Mosca and partisans of De Jouvenel. Answers to the question vary, so I can only really give you my own.
I hold that legitimacy is a phenomenon that doesn't happen in the masses, but in the mind of the elite. Legitimacy is what we call the Ruling Class's ability to retain will to power and organization by telling itself a convincing enough story about how its power is legitimate. I believe this because the only examples of circulation of elites available in all of history involve the ruling elite willingly letting go of their power, or rather not having the will to cling onto it at the price of incredible bloodshed. In any example I can think of where they did so at any price, the establishment remained.
No, it just seemed even sillier to me to recategorize the founding examples of totalitarianism as not totalitarian. Plus I seem to remember some neoreactionary stuff about "demotism", which put those regimes in the same category as liberal democracy.
But okay, your choice. So in nazi germany, where every civil association was forcibly absorbed into a nazi church, a nazi youth group, a nazi union; where every film and radio was spewing pure nazi propaganda, that regime did not care about public opinion, and wasn't totalitarian?
That's lame. Politics is more complicated than "Politics is more complicated than good vs evil dualism".
What despotic nations are you talking about? Africans? I think even the dictators don't care about politics in africa. China? The rulers care what the people think.
Sounds like a made-up pseudo-freudian theory.
But if they thought they were going to lose to a superior enemy, wouldn't they "let go of their power willingly"?
Approximately 99% of defeated nations do not fight to the last man in war. Does that mean that they are in fact the stronger party, and only a weak will can make them lose?
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Yes, voting is conflict. Unlike discussion, voting means the majority wins.
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What does taking over specific positions of political power have to do with the truth triumphing via discussion? Why were the intellectuals' tongues so tied before the elections? Why couldn't they just convince their opponents of the truth by making superior arguments? Yeah, in this context it's clearly conflict.
So voting works, we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham? Okay, next.
They did. Some, like our progenitor, in a rather ‘conflict avoidant’ way. Not my style, but still. Or did HBD warriors use their fists beat up on their enemies until they gave up?
Sure, but that necessarily means that discussion doesn't.
> A billionaire very likely changed the result of the election by buying a communications platform
> "we’re definitely done with all the nonsense about elites controlling everything and democracy being a sham?"
How? Why?
He didn't. He got bullied into keeping his mouth shut, and into personally shutting the mouths of anyone who agreed with him, until Trump won.
People, a large part of which knows nothing about HBD, used their votes to take away power from people who were censoring and terrorizing HBDers.
Why? Is discussion incompatible with democracy?
According to the previous alt right theory, “‘the elites” were acting collectively, in a specifically “‘New York Times” direction, against the wishes of the masses, always successfully. It wasn't predicting an isolated eliteman taking a turn to the right with popular support.
Although maybe that’s a caricature of alt right thinking on my part. A caricature of my position would be that billionaires/elites are just as influential as normal people.
That’s not what Moldbug’s theory was. Moldbug’s theory was always that a lot of ‘nominal’ elites were successful finance/tech/etc people who had a lot of money but were actually subordinate in power terms to a class of people who cared more about politics.
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Maybe we could discuss the actual merits of, say, de Mesquita et al.'s theory of the selectorate held against modern incarnations of Elite Theory instead of pretending that a school of political analysis that dates back to Polybius is a machination of a barely extant US political movement?
Who knows, we may well learn something.
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You gave "Voting doesn’t matter" along with "Discussion is pointless/conflict theory" as points that disprove the dissident right narrative. In the case we are discussing (I should have pointed out that "necessarily" was still meant in the context of the conversation, not universally) voting mattering is a direct consequences of discussion yielding no results, while a political victory caused a massive shift.
If discussion yielded results, it's not clear that voting would have mattered.
EDIT: actually let be more brief - when you are not voting on the issue that's being discussed, but the vote has a huge impact on the truth triumphing, while discussion has almost none, then the discussion not mattering results directly from voting mattering.
Well, perhaps you can outline what your actual position is, and then I can properly respond to it? You've been mostly focused on caricaturing the right, rather than putting forward what you believe.
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You'll notice that success at the polls was conditionned on coordinated elite action. Without Elon Musk, there is no trifecta. Voting works as a coordination mechanism for existing forces, it doesn't create forces out of thin air.
You should read Michels instead of imagining caricatures of his political model.
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